If ever there was a flag coloring the streets, it was the LGBT flag. To explain its colors, we must go back to ancient Greece, when the rainbow was seen as a magical path drawn by the goddess Eris between heaven and earth.
Looked closely, the rainbow has a magical element, no matter how insistent Aristotle was about pointing out that this path of colors was not caused by a goddess, but by the resonance of the light itself when it split into three colors (red, green and violet) creating an optical illusion. Hence, from Aristotle’s exact but incomplete interpretation, the rainbow would diminish its magical origin; To paraphrase the poet John Keats, rainbows would end up being part of the subscriber’s boring catalog.
Nevertheless, colorful rainbow flashes would continue to cast a spell on scientists such as Newton, the last magician, as Keynes described it. We must not forget that it was Newton who identified the seven colors of the rainbow with the seven chemical elements (gold, silver, copper, mercury, lead, iron and tin) and, for that matter, with the seven notes of our musical scale. . Following the Pythagorean tradition, rays of light caused vibrations of different intensities depending on their size. According to Newton, higher vibrations were identified with stronger colors (red or yellow) while lower vibrations were identified with weaker colors (indigo blue and violet); The fusion of them all resulted in the white color. In this way, Newton never quite ran into the magical feature of the rainbow when he tried to explain the phenomenon.
It should be remembered here that for his experiment, Newton placed a glass prism in front of a single ray of light that entered a dark room. In this way, the ray passed through the prism and reflected off the opposite wall where the colors of the rainbow appeared. If we put drops of water where we say prism, we will understand. Without it it wouldn’t happen.
However, the rainbow is not like the aurora borealis that exist even if no one sees it. In order for the rainbow to exist, in addition to the sun and rain, there must be an eye that captures the phenomenon, that is, without the personality of the observer, this phenomenon would not exist. Hence, the magical element cannot be separated from the scientific explanation by which the rainbow is due to the refraction of sunlight in raindrops.
But, on the other hand, to assert that, if the retina did not exist, the light would not be decomposed into seven colors would be a way of reducing reality, because the colors into which the light is decomposed are continuous, in such a way as to distinguish indigo from violet as difficult as impossible.
Perhaps for this reason, the flag that Gilbert Baker created for LGBT pride lacks indigo, red being the one we identify with life, orange with health, yellow with sunlight, and green with nature. Blue with serenity and purple with soul. With these objects, Becker searches for a match between colors and categories and – without any sense – gets close to Newton.
stone axe It is a section in which Monteiro Glaze, with a desire for prose, imposes his own siege on scientific reality to show that science and art are complementary forms of knowledge.
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